Magento Menu Customization with Product List

Magento main menu is construed based on the hierarchy like,

Root Category → Category → Sub-Category

We will customise the menu to show the Products of a category/su-bcategory along with its hierarchy in dropdown menu as seen below.

This is a good feature if you have less products in a website.

In order to implement the above structure, we need to modify the navigation.php file of drawItem() function like below. The navigation.php is available in the following location,

app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Block/Navigation.php

The code is,

<code>Public function drawItem($category, $level=0, $last=false){
$html = '';
if (!$category->getIsActive()) {
return $html;
}
$children = $category->getChildren();
$hasChildren = $children && $children->count();
/***** Getting Product List Start ******/
$cur_category = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load($category->getId());
$_productCollection =
Mage::getResourceModel('catalog/product_collection')->addCategoryFilter($cur_category)->setOrder('position',
'ASC');
$cnt=1;
$hasProduct1=$_productCollection->count();
$phtmlChildren='';
if($hasProduct1>=1){
$l=$level+1;
foreach ($_productCollection AS $_product){
$cur_product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($_product->getId());
if ($cur_product->getStatus()){
$phtmlChildren.= '<li';
if($cnt==$hasProduct1) {
$phtmlChildren.= ' class="level'.$l;
$phtmlChildren.= ' nav-'.$this->htmlEscape($cur_product->getName()).' last';
}
else {
$phtmlChildren.= ' class="level'.$l;
$phtmlChildren.= ' nav-'.$this->htmlEscape($cur_product->getName());
}
$phtmlChildren.= '">'."\n";
$phtmlChildren.= ' <a href="/'.$cur_product->getUrlPath() .
'.html">'. $this->htmlEscape($cur_product->getName()) .
'</a>'."\n";
$phtmlChildren.= '</li>';
$cnt=$cnt+1;
}
}
}
/***** Getting Product List End ******/
$html.= '<li';
if ($hasChildren || (!empty($phtmlChildren)))
$html.= ' onmouseover="toggleMenu(this,1)" onmouseout="toggleMenu(this,0)"';
$html.= ' class="level'.$level;
$html.= ' nav-'.str_replace('/', '-', $category->getRequestPath());
if ($this->isCategoryActive($category))
$html.= ' active';
if ($last)
$html .= ' last';
if ($hasChildren || (!empty($phtmlChildren))) {
$cnt = 0;
foreach ($children as $child)
if ($child->getIsActive())
$cnt++;
$html .= ' parent';
}
$html.= '">'."\n";
$html.= '<a
href="'.$this->getCategoryUrl($category).'"><span>'.$this->htmlEscape($category->getName()).'</span></a>'."\n";
$htmlChildren = '';
if ($hasChildren) {
$j = 0;
foreach ($children as $child)
if ($child->getIsActive())
$htmlChildren.= $this->drawItem($child, $level+1, ++$j >= $cnt);
}
if ((!empty($htmlChildren)) || (!empty($phtmlChildren)))
$html.= '<ul class="level' . $level . '">'."\n" .$htmlChildren .$phtmlChildren .'</ul>';
$html.= '</li>'."\n";
return $html;
}</code>

The below lines in drawItem() function will fetch the current sub-category’s product list based on the sub-category id. The $_productCollection has the list of product of selected subcategory by getting the id as $category->getId() function.

<code> $cur_category = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load($category->getId());
$_productCollection =
Mage::getResourceModel('catalog/product_collection')->addCategoryFilter($cur_category)->setOrder('position',
'ASC'); </code>

We will loop through them and generate the menu structure using <li></li> tag.

From Hastentechnologies.com

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3. Magento Vertical Category Menu
4. Get Product for a Specific Store in Magento
5. How to Customize Magento Product Page